Pantheon's Drupal Hosting

I have been working on Drupal for over 5 years and was even surprised how quickly I spun up a site on Pantheon when I first used their product awhile back. But it sounds like you’ve already done that and are looking for feedback on their features, hosting, etc., rather than help getting started.

First, you get 3 environments out of the box: development, testing, live. It’s similar to having 3 servers, but without having to set any up. Their servers are based on the Rackspace cloud. Also, Pantheon is Git-based, which I consider a must-have.

None of the sites I personally own get “crazy” traffic (100k+/mo), which is how you truly test the hosting capabilities, but the New Republic claims they had over 100,000,000 pageviews on their launch day with Pantheon, and schools like Berkeley, Stanford, and ASU use them. That should answer any concerns there.

Also, their multidev functionality, allowing me to share a dev environment with others is huge. Make unlimited forks all hosted in the cloud, which everybody has access to, plus feature branching, etc. I know that’s not focused on hosting per se, but if you are managing multiple sites with multiple people, you need this.

Lastly, here is some additional tips for hosting on Pantheon: https://drupal.org/node/2014127

And their CTO, David Strauss, has great info here, along with Dries: http://www.quora.com/GetPantheon-vs-Omega8-vs-Acquia-pros-and-cons-of-each

I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but I hope that helps.

Hey Casey,

I'm obviously a biased source as one of the founders of Pantheon, but we really thing we've got the best answer out there for Drupal hosting. Our services go way beyond traditional hosting options: they include everything you need to build, launch and run your sites over the long haul. Our ultimate goal is to make "hosting" obsolete. It's an out-dated way of thinking about what people really need in order to run software-powered websites using Drupal.

The best way to get a sense for how it works it to try it: Pantheon is always free for developers so you don't have to take my word for it.

If you're pressed for time, check out this intro video, or any of the other videos in our channel.

Happy to answer any additional questions!

Whether it be for quickly spinning up nonprofit sites or developing and launching enterprise sites, Kalamuna has more or less worked exclusively with Pantheon Systems.

We think highly of their product and service, and we've even built a website toolkit Kalabox to pull/push our sites down/up from/to Pantheon. Check it out: kalabox.kalamuna.com

Personal story: Pantheon's version control saved my sanity and happiness. They inherited a frankenstein of a website and enabled my team to work in a stable and organized way. We launched successfully thanks to them. Hurray!

I'm not sure what I can say that hasn't already been said here at this point, except all these awesome things are true, and they rock.

The truth is, as a member of the first alpha/beta testing group for Pantheon over 2 years ago and a completely rabid, crazy-person, hyper-evangelistic fangirl ever since, Pantheon has saved the bacon of me and my colleagues at Gotham City Drupal more times than I can even count. In fact, it's totally fair to say that our business model revolves around Pantheon, for all the reasons stated above, but ALSO (and critically, for us):
- no more arguing about or dealing with DevOps best practices in Drupal. Pantheon implemented them straight from the rulebook in the best-possible ways, and now I never have to argue with a client or developer again that yes, we DO need three environments, and we DO need drush and Git, and we SHOULD use nginx, etc. And that, my friends, was one argument that I was so sick of having I could scream. Thousands of hours of developer, client and me-time have been saved by this single aspect of Pantheon, not to mention the comfort and joy of knowing that (especially with Multidev and Kalabox), we never have to worry about matching environments again.
- oh yeah - the performance totally rocks, right out of the box, from the mightiest to the lowest-priced account levels. And that's basically not true of anyone else, ever.

I've talked every client we've ever had into moving to Pantheon, from every type of hosting you can imagine (huge and tiny), and not a single one has ever moved away again. And they're all thrilled with the service and support they've received.

I've migrated some RIDICULOUS sites to Pantheon (in fact, my FIRST Pantheon migration was a massive nonprofit with a 7GB database(!) and full CiviCRM/Drupal 6 implementation - and that was in the first month of their EARLIEST (v1) beta version - it ran (and still runs) like a top. Boom!

I'm happy to have a 1:1 (or 1:x) conversation anytime, with anyone, who wants to hear me rant about how much I love Pantheon and why they should too. So feel free to hit me up for more.

Kelly Bell
Founder and CTO
Gotham City Drupal

Pantheon has been spamming me recently with Drupal related emails, offering their services - and I'm not happy. Their emails link to this post on the drupal.org website. Presumably this post is here to give them the air of legitimacy. I wonder if there's a way I can flag this post as spam?...

I've got a large site that has ~20G of images that need to be kept in file storage, which instantly forces the jump to Enterprise level hosting. The CDN integration that I've seen (via the contrib CDN module) keeps local copies and only duplicates to CDN (unless you are running in file conveyor mode, which would require server level processes not readily supported by Pantheon), so that doesn't help cut this down at all.

This is all well and good, and I understand price jumps for storage of that quantity, but I was wondering if anyone has had success using the Storage API module and setting Amazon (or other) as an external file system on Pantheon?